CISA is warning OT and ICS operators to get ready for something that has moved from worst-case scenario to realistic planning assumption: a cyberattack that actually succeeds in disabling control systems and disrupting the services people rely on.
Their new CI Fortify initiative reflects that shift.
Rather than focusing only on stopping attackers, it pushes organizations to plan for what happens after a breach. The guidance assumes that in a serious incident, especially one connected to a broader conflict, communications could degrade or go down, third-party connections might become unreliable, and operators could lose normal visibility into their processes.
In practical terms, that means building the ability to isolate critical OT environments from business networks when needed, then keep essential operations running through documented systems, tested backups, and rehearsed manual procedures.
That requires a clear, up-to-date picture of what assets exist, how they are configured, and how they connect to each other.
CISA’s initiative with CI Fortify lines up with what operators are experiencing. Nation-state actors are no longer just poking at the perimeter. Groups like Volt Typhoon and similar advanced teams have shown they can get inside critical infrastructure networks, move quietly, and stay there for months unnoticed.
Their goal in many cases appears to be pre-positioning.
CISA has made it clear these actors may be setting themselves up to cause real disruption to power, water, and other essential services if geopolitical tensions escalate. The longer they remain undetected, the more damage they can potentially do when they decide to act.
This is exactly why deep, continuous visibility into OT assets and configurations has become so important. If you don’t have a clear picture of what’s actually running in your environment, it becomes much harder to spot the kind of stealthy activity these groups rely on.
For many operators, however, planning for resilience is easier said than done.
Effective recovery requires organizations
Unfortunately, many critical infrastructure organizations still struggle with basic OT asset inventory and visibility challenges. CISA has previously identified asset inventory as a foundational requirement for reducing cyber risk and improving operational resilience.
This is exactly where Industrial Defender helps operators stay ahead of the challenge.
Industrial Defender's OT asset management and configuration monitoring capabilities help organizations establish the operational visibility required to support CISA's resilience objectives. By maintaining a continuously updated inventory of OT assets, software versions, network relationships, and configuration baselines, operators gain a clear understanding of what systems are essential to maintaining operations during a crisis.
Industrial Defender also allows organizations to identify configuration drift, unauthorized changes, and operational risks before they lead to larger disruptions. In a worst-case scenario where operators must restore systems or transition to manual operations, having accurate asset and configuration data becomes indispensable.
The importance of preparedness has been reinforced by recent incidents affecting industrial environments worldwide.
In February 2026, CISA highlighted a December 2025 attack on Poland's energy sector, in which adversaries gained access through vulnerable internet-facing edge devices, then deployed wiper malware that damaged remote terminal units, corrupted firmware on OT devices, and wiped human-machine interface data across roughly 30 renewable energy sites, a combined heat and power plant, and a manufacturing facility.
Power generation and other critical infrastructure operators face a specific challenge under NIS2: proving continuous cybersecurity governance across OT environments that were never designed with compliance reporting in mind.
Industrial Defender closes that gap with capabilities purpose-built for the Directive's technical and organizational requirements.
Active, native OT visibility. Unlike passive-only monitoring tools, Industrial Defender collects asset and configuration data directly from industrial protocols (SSH, DNP3, Modbus, IEC 61850) at Purdue Level 1 and above — through Passive Monitoring, agentless active collection (IDC), or a lightweight persistent Agent. That gives generators a complete, current asset inventory instead of a partial picture built only from network traffic, which is essential for NIS2's risk-management and asset-accountability obligations.
Continuous risk and vulnerability management. The platform correlates asset data against CVE feeds and AI-enhanced threat intelligence, tiering exposures by urgency ("Act Now" vs. "Act/Protect") so security teams can prioritize what actually threatens generation and grid operations — directly supporting NIS2's risk-treatment and residual-risk-monitoring requirements.
Configuration and change management. Because unauthorized changes are a leading cause of OT incidents, Industrial Defender tracks configuration drift across control systems and generates audit-ready evidence, mapping to the technical measures in ENISA's NIS2 implementation guidance.
Incident-readiness documentation. NIS2's 24-hour early-warning and 72-hour reporting obligations put pressure on operators to produce accurate system-state evidence fast. Automated, framework-aligned reporting shortens that scramble — customers using the platform have cut audit preparation time and compliance documentation effort dramatically.
Governance-body support. With NIS2 extending personal liability to management bodies, Industrial Defender's dashboards give executives defensible, up-to-date visibility into cyber posture — not just IT teams.
Proven at scale. Industrial Defender already secures power generation, transmission, and distribution environments across North America and Europe, with deployments completed in under four weeks — critical for operators facing near-term national transposition deadlines.
The result: European power generators get a single platform bridging OT visibility, vulnerability management, and compliance documentation, turning NIS2 from a burden into an operational security upgrade.
The webinar can help anyone tasked with complying with NIS2 regulatory requirements to better understand the landscape and learn how Industrial Defender can support their work.
Generation continued, but operators temporarily lost the ability to monitor and control affected systems. The incident demonstrated how cyberattacks can directly impact physical operations, and underscored the need for hardened edge devices, strong identity controls, network segmentation, asset visibility, and recovery planning.
Prevention alone is no longer enough.
Organizations must be prepared to operate through disruption.
That means:
Industrial Defender helps operators get that foundation in place by delivering active discovery and a continuously updated view of their OT assets, configurations, and dependencies.
With that information readily available, teams can better understand what’s running in their environment, know which systems matter most, stay ahead on compliance, and move more deliberately if they ever need to isolate or recover during an incident.
This kind of visibility turns resilience planning from a theoretical exercise into something operators can actually act on with confidence.
The question is no longer whether an organization can stop every attack. Instead, the focus is on whether critical operations can continue when an attack succeeds. For operators responsible for delivering power, water, manufacturing output, or transportation services, resilience has become just as important as prevention, and solutions from Industrial Defender, including OT Asset Management, Configuration and Change Management in OT, Policy Compliance, and Vulnerability Management, provide the foundation necessary to achieve both.
Industrial Defender has been focused on OT environments since 2006, building its platform specifically to give operators reliable, continuously updated visibility into their assets and configurations without disrupting operations. That foundation has helped major utilities and critical infrastructure operators stay on top of compliance while also giving them the operational clarity they need when things don’t go as planned.
If you're starting to map out what CI Fortify means for your environment, request a demo, and we can show you how the platform delivers the asset visibility and configuration clarity operators are using to prepare.
